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mobile development on the mac

ever since we started spyonit.com (sorry, no link to this one) which was run primarily on solaris x86, i have been on a quest to find the perfect unix laptop on which to develop and otherwise enjoy all there is to enjoy in the computing world. at that time, solaris x86 itself had no drivers available for pcmcia, and the linux distrobutions were pretty crappy as well, especially for laptop support. there were a few hacks around that would help get these running on an ibm thinkpad, but nothing stable enough to allow me wear the different hats i had to wear as a development manager, product manager, and executive manager.

finally, a little over a year ago my engineers turned me on to what apple was doing with OS X, and what they had brought onto the powerbook g4 lineup, which at the time only came in the 15" non-yao-ming-non-mini-me version. it seemed to be perfect for everything i needed to do - command line unix support, a supported java IDE in borland jbuilder 7, and supported microsoft office suite in office.x. so i had quickly forsaken the shitty canadian toshiba laptops our IT department provided for people and plopped down my own cash to purchase a powerbook g4, which i used with great success in those management, marketing, and development manager roles that i had to perform.

here at chez burning door, i've had to delve into some more development tasks, specifically in the mobile arena, and unfortunately, i've had to bring my old thinkpad out of mothballs. now i'm a 2 laptop man.

i certainly don't want to go back to XP as my sole machine. there's no way i could live without my powerbook these days for most of the work i have to do, not to mention organizing my life. it's not quite bumper sticker worthy of you can take my mac when you pry it from my cold dead hands but damn close.

to put it bluntly, there's no good way to develop for

* J2ME
* BREW
* Symbian C++
* Microsoft Mobile

on a mac. there is a gcc port of the brew environment sans emulators, but it doesn't compare to the visual c++ version. microsoft mobile i understand, that's fine.

and no, virtual pc is not the answer. don't get me wrong, virtual pc is an amazing piece of software but i've tried running visual studio and codewarrior inside of it, and it all works fine, but too slow to be productive.

on the j2me side, i've even stooped to installing red hat in a virtual pc, and running the supported linux development tools and using X to present it to the powerbook, but that's too slow as well.

on the pc (and linux virtual pc), i've been using sun's studio one 5, preview to do development, which is okay, but being a a Java app, how hard is it really for sun to support this on OS X? actually, it does run on OSX, but the wireless toolkit (WTK) does not. it uses native code for preverification and the emulator uses a native DLL as well.

i've found a few excuses as to why sun doesn't support os x, and to summarize it's because it doesn't help them sell hardware. fair enough, but don't they also make money selling SUN studio one? also fair, if apple wants to keep me on their platform and upgrade, they should support development tools running on their platform. jbuilder 9 for linux does run on os x, but it's not supported by borland - they abondoned support after jbuilder 7.

part of the marketing of os x is that it's part open source, part commercial. well, that's where mobile developers are stuck on this platform: between half-ass open source solutions, and commercial solutions that can't make a business case for supporting os x.

well, the point of this whole rant is for any of those mobile developers out there wanting to switch to the mac, caveat emptor. it's highly encouraged, but don't ebay that pc just yet.